Adventures in Social Networking: 1. Incivility Happens

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 — Brad

Being a social creature, I keep and maintain both a Twitter (AhabLives ) and a Facebook account. The latter is for personal contacts back in Ohio and Kentucky who I never see and never email, about whom I’m sometimes curious. The problem is, many of them are decidedly more conservative than I, which poses a problem when I decide to post the something that actually reveals what I actually think about the state of the world. Case in point, upon word yesterday of the Pope’s throwing open the doors to the Church for Anglicans, I posted: “A glorious day for misogynistic, homophobic bigots who happen to be Anglican! Kudos to you.” This set off a chain of acrimonious comments and private emails that my normal postings–e.g., ” Having obliterated the philosophical basis for ontologizing the sublime in a matter of a few pages, I think I can safely begin to wrap this paper up with a footnote explaining string theory”–rarely does. The major criticism of what I wrote was that it misrepresents as hatred and fear what is really just an alternative set of convictions. To which my response (in hindsight, I realize) added fuel to the fire: “Those who are not themselves filled with hate and fear can take solace, I suppose, that their convictions just happen to be those of misogynistic, homophobic bigots. (I know I do when my own views are compared with those of tyrants.)” For the most part, people employed selective reading and chose to disregard my fairly conciliatory parenthetical gesture, and instead chose to focus on my ungraceful incivility.

This got me thinking about the question of civility in dialogue. We go on about this a lot here. Well, actually Adam goes on about it a lot, since he & Anthony tend to be the ones to whom the issue is raised more often. I, as ever, remain the good cop. (This is, true to the metaphor, because I’m hardly ever around.) More broadly, people in general complain about the uncivil social discourse in this country, and how it is what is somehow holding us back. I’m not convinced this is true, though. Obviously, it may cause strain on one’s personal relationships. That’s not the issue. The problem, with respect to incivility in public discourse, is when incivility is instrumentalized beyond its natural, maybe even sometimes healthy, occurrences in specific situations. The problem, in other words, isn’t the screaming person on either side of a position or conviction, it is when that screaming person is given the title “columnist” or “analyst,” and who uses incivility as a tool (namely, a bludgeon).

So, in short, you should feel free to be a dick. Just try to avoid thinking your being a dick is conveying anything more than how much of a dick you are.